Design Thinking & The Liberal Arts

Before COVID-19, I started reading about design thinking because Jamie Turner shared an article about design thinking in K-12 classrooms. What I discovered shocked me…it was….EXACTLY WHAT WE DO IN THE LIBERAL ARTS CLASSROOM.

Seriously.

“Design” as a way of rethinking theology and the liberal arts has been around for a while. Tony Golsby-Smith founder of Second Road and Gospel Conversations has been bringing the habits of the liberal arts to business for decades. I’ve worked for Tony and learned a lot from his application of Aristotle’s “second road” to truth — which is rhetoric — as the way we create new realities. And I studied under people like Rikk E. Watts who recently gave a series of talks on Design as the New Theology, emphasizing (as the blurb on one of his talks states),

“Design is the art of choices – and every Design choice is informed by character not by rules….God’s actions reveal his character not a rule book.”

So what caught my eye with “Design Thinking” in STEAM education right now?

The breakdown of steps that constitute the “design thinking” process.

I quickly googled “Design Thinking” and “Liberal Arts” and was relieved to see a few people seemed to notice the connection. At least, they were connecting it to business and entrepreneurial habits and suggesting a marriage between the two. But a marriage between design thinking and the liberal arts isn’t necessary because they teach the same habits of mind.

Here’s why…

Design thinking is a recursive (as in the steps feed back on themselves) process involving these five phases:

Empathize – with your users
Define – your users’ needs, their problem, and your insights
Ideate – by challenging assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions
Prototype – to start creating solutions
Test – solutions

And here’s what we do in the liberal arts classroom, particularly the literature classroom:

Empathize with the characters and other readers
Define the characters problems, our problems with their problems, their insights and our insights
Ideate by challenging the text’s and our own assumptions to create new ideas about both the world of the text and our own world
Prototype (often in writing) to begin creating new readings of the text or new applications for our world drawn from the text
Test these solutions by sharing them with others, listening to their feedback, even taking our ideas to market in various ways.

It’s not just the verbs, the actual steps are exactly the same. Even better, in this really helpful article, What is Design Thinking and Why is it so Popular? by the Interaction Design Foundation — narrative is highlighted as one of the primary epistemologies, or ways of knowing, at work in design thinking. Rikke Friis Dam and Yu Siang Teo (the article’s authors) write:

Telling stories can help us inspire opportunities, ideas and solutions. Stories are framed around real people and their lives. Stories are important because they are accounts of specific events, not general statements. They provide us with concrete details that help us imagine solutions to particular problems.

I could have written that paragraph. In fact, I’ve said something exactly like that more times than I can count in classes, lectures, and defenses of the liberal arts….

So instead of wringing our hands about the death of the humanities, we need to grab hold of design thinking, particularly the clear phases of thought and emphasis on narrative it offers. Through the language offered in these five phases, we can rethink our stodgy approaches to the drama of the intellectual life so that everyone can see the beauty, fun, and real-life usefulness of the liberal arts.